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Beef and Vegetable Soup Recipe - America's Test Kitchen
Choose whole sirloin tip steaks over ones that have been cut into small pieces for stir-fries. If sirloin tip steaks are unavailable, substitute blade or flank steak, removing any hard gristle or excess fat. Button mushrooms can be used in place of the cremini mushrooms, with some trade-off in flavor. Our preferred brand of beef broth is Pacific. If you like, add 1 cup of frozen peas, frozen corn, or frozen cut green beans during the last 5 minutes of cooking. For a heartier soup, add 10 ounces of red-skinned potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
(2 cups), during the last 15 minutes of cooking.
Beef and Vegetable Soup
Serves 6
Given enough meat, bones, and time, a great beef soup isn't all that hard to make. But can you make an equally great soup without spending that much time and energy?
We wanted to make beef and vegetable soup in just an hour, without sacrificing the intense flavor of a long-simmered homemade beef stock.
We first needed to find a cut of meat with the right texture. After testing nearly a dozen samples, we settled on sirloin tip steak—its shredded texture fooled tasters into thinking the meat had cooked for hours. To keep to our time limit, we had to use store-bought broth but knew it would need some serious doctoring. After analyzing the flavor components in beef broth, we tested a group of foods that contained glutamates—naturally occurring flavor compounds that accentuate beefy flavors. We chose cremini mushrooms, tomato paste, soy sauce, and red wine. Finally, we wanted to recreate the richness developed in long-simmered soup that is a result of collagen (tough proteins in the meat and bones) breaking down into gelatin. Adding a tablespoon of gelatin softened in cold water provided the missing viscosity.
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